Of all the things I imagined doing on a starry spring night on St. Peters Church Road, Skyping with China wasn’t one of them.
There we were on the back porch, under a pristine canopy of stars, the peepers going full tilt in the little pond, the glow of Harrisburg barely visible over Blue Mountain, while our Chinese homestay student, Wenrui (“When-Ray”) chatted with her parents back home.
Looking up at the stars of a Friday night, after a stressful drive from Baltimore, has become part of our arrival ritual. We love the skies of Perry County. Baltimore isn’t a big city anymore, but there’s still plenty of light pollution. The stars are rarely visible down there, and when they are, even on a crisp winter’s night, there’s a certain dullness to them, as if someone had stretched plastic wrap across the skyline.
The clarity of the stars in the shadow of Blue Mountain was a kind of revelation to us, but we were people who’d sought out the night sky, on and off, throughout our lives. Imagine if you’d never even seen the stars, not really, through the lights and smog of a modern industrial city — say in coastal China.
As soon as we climbed out of the car and looked up, Wenrui bubbled over with enthusiasm. “I can see them!” she said, as if the stars were a grizzly bear, or a bald eagle, some rare beast spotted through binoculars on safari.
“I love the stars here,” Shana said.
“I’ve never seen them before,” Wenrui said.
I thought she meant that she hadn’t seen them in a long time, or perhaps not yet in the States. Verb tenses are a lot more complicated in English than in Chinese — an ongoing frustration for a student of our language, who’s forced to think in categories of past action that would all get lumped together in her mother tongue.
“Really?” I asked. “You haven’t seen them in a while?”
“No,” she said. “Never.”
I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Just a month before, at the edge of the Sahara desert, of all places, we’d met a young Indian man, a respectable banker living in London, who expressed astonishment at the sight of the stars over the dunes. Turns out, he’d never seen a truly dark night sky, either.
How does a person get to be fifteen years old, like Wenrui — or nearly thirty, in the case of that star-struck banker — without ever having seen the Milky Way?
The answer lies, I suppose, in growing up in a big, permanently awake city like Delhi or Qingdao (“Ching-Dao”), or, for that matter, London or New York, where the ancient rhythm of day and night has been superseded by a 24-hour economy, and with it, the need for lit roads and parking lots.
That night on the back porch, Wenrui was so excited about the stars she decided to call her parents in Qingdao. The phone call was as amazing to me as the night sky was to her. When we first moved onto St. Peters Church Road, our cell phones didn’t work at the house, which was irritating and charming, in equal measure. We liked the feeling of being “off the grid,” but at the same time, we wanted to be able to call for help in case of a mowing emergency, say, or a kayaking one.
We switched phones around the time AT&T built the new tower in Landisburg, and — lo and behold! — now we can make calls from the property.
But Skyping isn’t really part of our lives, so when Wenrui dialed home and started talking a mile a minute in Chinese, showing us, on the painfully bright screen of her smart phone, the smiling faces of her mother and father, I have to admit that I popped a mental fuse.
Everything was so familiar on the porch — the stars; the delightful chilly air, slightly redolent of cow pies; the urgent song of the peepers — and yet so strange. Wenrui’s mother was giving us a tour of her house in Qingdao, carrying the phone out to the garden, so she could show off the apricot tree the grandparents had planted when Wenrui was little.
But it was daytime in China, and too bright outside for her phone’s camera!
Wenrui aimed her camera at the stars to show them to her parents, but the night sky was too dark for her phone’s camera!
America couldn’t see China; China couldn’t see America. But the sound of the peepers came through just fine.
Wenrui’s parents pronounced the frog song “beautiful.”
